WASHINGTON — A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.

Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written from February 2002 to January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring U.S. institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.

The documents meticulously record the detainees’ “pocket litter” when they were captured: a bus ticket to Kabul, a fake passport and forged student ID, a restaurant receipt, even a poem. They note their serial interrogations, enumerating — even after six or more years of relentless questioning — remaining “areas of potential exploitation.” They describe inmates’ infractions.

The secret documents, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a “high risk” of posing a threat to the United States and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision. But they also show that an even larger number of the prisoners who have left the facility — about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries — were also designated “high risk.”

The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has convinced the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.

The files provide new details about the most infamous of their prisoners, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Around March 2002, he ordered a former Baltimore resident to carry out a “martyrdom” attack against Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, according to the documents. But the assignment turned out to be just a test of the man’s “willingness to die for the cause.”

Obama administration officials condemned the publication of the classified documents, which were obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks last year but provided to The New York Times by another source. The officials pointed out that an administration task force set up in January 2009 reviewed the information in the prisoner assessments, and in some cases came to different conclusions. Thus, they said, the documents may not represent the government’s current view of detainees at Guantanamo.

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